


Can't Get No

by sunsmasher



Category: Homestuck
Genre: F/M, Post-Canon, Road Trips
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-03-17
Updated: 2014-03-17
Packaged: 2018-01-16 01:09:16
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,083
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1326064
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sunsmasher/pseuds/sunsmasher
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Dave, Terezi, Roxy, Kanaya, Jade and Sollux drive 2500 miles from New York to New Mexico in a car beat to shit and filled with skittles. Along the way, Kanaya saves her girlfriend, Roxy makes some friends, Sollux escapes to better company, and Jade dreams of physics.</p><p>Dave and Terezi possibly break up. Or maybe they already did. Or maybe they never will.</p><p>It's up to interpretation.</p><p>
  <em>"Everything in life is somewhere else, and you get there in a car." —Troll Sun Tzu</em>
</p>
            </blockquote>





	Can't Get No

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks to Allison for the beta, and dragonchat for the encouragement, and dragonchat again for not kicking me off Skype every time I complained about this stupid ship.
> 
> I still don't know if it's possible to write a Dave/Terezi roadtrip fic and not just end up with Five Weeks in May, but, man, I just had to try.

They fucked on every flat surface in the apartment the day before they drove out. There weren’t many, since it was Manhattan, and if you’ve got an apartment with more than three flat surfaces of the necessary length, width, and load-bearing ability for fucking-upon, then you don’t leave it. You die in that apartment.

Dave and Terezi had the bed and the floor. There was no couch because the bed was the couch and the table under the window had the size but lacked the fortitude, so they compensated with Dave bent over the kitchen counter and some fingering in the shower. It didn’t have the adventurous sex-capade ring of “every flat surface,” Terezi admitted from the other end of the tub, hair slick against her skull from the shower, the orgasm, and the August heat beading on the walls, but she felt the landlord would appreciate the thought regardless. The man had violated the covenant to repair 17 times by her own count, as Dave had been told (not for the first time) during their second play-through of the kitchen counter.

_(“And in January 2021 you’ll remember he declined to fix the leak under the sink for three weeks, despite my regular and well-evidenced complaints—“_

_“Fuck, tz, slow down—“_

_“I contacted the local tenant’s rights and representation attorney, but you could smell the Columbia on her, no wonder he laughed at my threats—“_

_“_ Terezi _. As pleased as I am that you’ve decided to treat my—_ nggghh _—ass like your very own stress ball, my face is getting pretty goddamn intimate with the ricemaker up here, so how about we drop it down into first before I start leaving bloody locks of hair in the off-brand appliances.”)_

The fucking dissolved into distracted handjob interludes between rounds of Burrito Bison Revenge quicker than they’d expected, Dave blindly fumbling at Terezi’s crotch while his left hand slammed the spacebar, swearing at every Cop Bear he jumped, so the sky was still that heavy, saturated gold of late afternoon when they repaired for the final time to the shower. Light pushed sluggishly through the frosted glass of the bathroom window, syrupy and a deepening yellow against the cheap tile on the wall as they washed, screwed (whoops) then washed again. By the time the last evidence of their heinous sin had been washed down the drain, the hot water was long since run out and the evening had turned blue as Gatorade. Faint music hummed in from the street, muffled and warped through the glass.

“So we’re leaving when?” Dave asked from his seat under the showerhead, deftly nudging Terezi’s foot away from his dick as she grinned with blatant malice aforethought.

“Oh-eight-hundred, Dave!” she replied, grin sliding into an expression of shock ripped right off Daffy Duck. “I made sure to both italicize and underline that on the printed itinerary I left on your pillow this morning.”

“You say these things and expect me to believe that you’re organized,” he returned, perhaps unconsciously dipping his head into the classic ‘I’m so skeptical I’ll let my glasses slide down my nose just to prove how skeptical I am’ look. “But cookielips, I’m leading you on here. My question is pointed like a chopstick and as treacherous as the white man’s belief in his ability to use stated chopstick. I know we’re leaving at asscrack o’clock, my point is that you are not packed. You are in fact, super not packed. You’re like gas in the atmosphere, all throwing its shit around and dumping kinetic energy all over the damn place. It’s time to desublimate, tz.”

Terezi snerked, finally ceasing her attempts to play footsie with lil’ Dave, and slicked her hair back from her face.

“I am enlisting in the Legislacerator Corps, mister boyfriend, not human liberal arts university! My regulation duffle bag is already in the car. The rest will be on the curb come the dawn.”

Dave’s face twisted minutely, like the faucet was digging into his spine, but then it had never happened, and he scoffed with mock disdain, “Yo, we don’t have a car. We live in Manhattan. You can’t even tame a fucking taxi without three pints of virgin’s blood and a naked cowboy.”

“It’s lucky we’ve got you around to help then!” Terezi didn’t seem to have noticed the facial fuckup. Her toes inched forward again.

“You really can’t call me a virgin when you’re still trying to play xbox with my dick as the joystick and your big toe as the cheeto-greased thumb and holy shit would you just stop, woman.”

She didn’t, and Dave considered trying to stare her down, but that had never exactly worked before. Terezi could get the caps off bottles with her teeth. That one tooth in front specifically, on the right, with the dot of yellow on it. When she smiled like she smiled then, it was the first thing Dave saw.

“You’re the naked cowboy, cowboy, Karkat provided services as virgin-at-large. The car’s parked outside.”

“Not the Volvo.”

Dave loved that dot of yellow more than he could possibly admit to.

“Dave, I have some bad news.”

 

\----

 

The Volvo, for its part, drove much better than it looked. Terezi was not legally allowed to drive (SP3C31SM!), but she had smiled very widely at the poor man selling it on craigslist and he had told her as much. He’d absolutely assured her of it, in fact, then asked if he could have his pen back because he really thought he should get going now.

“But it hasn’t even got extremely groovy wood paneling,” Dave moaned as Terezi tossed him the keys and pulled out her phone. “How can you expect me to drive you twenty-one hundred miles in a Volvo station wagon without so much as some skeuomorphic wood grain to tart it up?

Terezi didn’t reply, tongue involved in the delicate work of navigating her ancient iPhone’s touch screen. Dave sighed dramatically and slumped against a parking meter, rubbing the lingering sleep from his eyes as he assessed the Volvo 240 station wagon suddenly appeared on his block.

It was blue, and one of the back tires didn’t match. The tail pipe could fit at least three potatoes. Bird shit had, at some point, and then at many points after, happened to it.

Work complete, he tried not to fall asleep on the curb.

Alphabet City was surprisingly quiet for 8 am. The rest of the Lower East Side boomed with the typical agonies of a Saturday morning, car horns and mad cyclists and vicious hangovers making their case at every decibel and from every direction, but Avenue B kept its peace. It susurrated without much fuss, grey light waxing into yellow as the sun cleared the river, that signature smell of delayed gentrification (the seedy bars’ 1970’s reek of despair and infrequently-cleaned urinals versus the block’s constantly renewing population of bakeries and perfumed boutiques (est. 2019)) rising up from the sidewalk. Dave called it “a fine 1988 vintage of perpetual class conflict.” Terezi likened the taste to yeasty waffles.

“Hey. Pimpslaughterer.” Terezi broke in, snapping bony fingers in front of his face. “On your feet, please. We have another stop to make.”

“Shit, really? Since when?” Dave pushed himself up, sleep popping from his joints. 8AM should be illegal, he was sure.

“Since right now, my fondest marsupial,” Terezi replied, waving her phone in one hand. It glistened with a thick frosting of saliva, but Dave could almost make out the colorful mess of pesterchum beneath. “Kanaya needs a ride out to Pennsylvania, and I offered our services.” She paused to stare into his face, sniffing lightly, and added, “Will that be a problem?”

Dave came to the sudden realization that he was grimacing like a motherfucker. Before he could do something clever, like, say, stop, he did something stupid instead.

“I dunno, maybe,” he said, shrugging noncommittally and staring at any number of points that weren’t Terezi’s face. He could hear the petulant tone in his own voice but damn if he could make it go away. “We’re already going like three thousand miles out of our way for Roxy, you really think we have time to drop off yet another of our loser friends before hitting the spaceport?”

Terezi squinted at him, one side of her mouth drawn tight.

“Yes,” she returned, slow and deliberate. “I do! That would be why I agreed. Kanaya tells me her stop is right by the highway, which means that we will make it to Chicago with Roxy on schedule, and then we will make it to Albuquerque with Jade on schedule, and then we will be at the spaceport on schedule. Military transports are rather known for their punctuality, you see, and I do not plan to miss my ride! Is there a reason you’re being an ass about this? ”

If Dave had taken the time to consider Terezi’s question, his answer may have had something to do with the Alternian military transport departing Upham, New Mexico in four days, or the small grey duffle bag already in the back of the car containing everything Terezi held dear enough to keep, but he didn’t, so it didn’t. What you didn’t think about couldn’t hurt you, right?

“Sorry,” he sighed, after too long a moment. His head ached. “I’m just tired. Don’t like driving with too many people in the car.”

Terezi, because she was and always would be a better person than Dave, better by miles and miles, let his weak shit slide. “It’s five people in five seats, toe stub, I am certain you will survive. Go put your shit in the car.”

“Right,” Dave muttered absently as he bent for the bags, trying so hard to not think about things he spent at least twenty seconds grasping at the handle of the snack bag (number 13 of 13) before Terezi took pity and kicked it within reach. “Right. Bag in hand, bags in car, I can do this, I got this.”

“Oof, keep it to yourself, Strider!” Terezi said, lacking a certain clarity to her mockery as she returned to licking at Pesterchum. “You know how such inspiring rhetoric gets me wet.”

“Oh, I get you wet, do I?” Dave encouraged a grin, knowing a hand graciously, figuratively extended when he saw one. He fingerbanged the back of the car as he spoke, searching for the trunk handle as Terezi’s smile widened behind her iPhone. “Tell me more, _mon petit omelette du fromage_. Wet like overcooked broccoli or wet like laundry after the dyer breaks mid-fucking-cycle?”

“Wet like sea cucumbers, my darling grub incubator, wet like an unexpected lack of antiperspirant!”

Dave popped the trunk and reached to nudge Terezi’s lonely grey duffle bag aside, aiming for the teetering mountain of sucrose-based foodstuffs already present in the car. “Wet like the kitchen fl— holy shitting _FUCK—”_

As Dave’s voice rose to a ball-tingling crescendo and his ass met the concrete, Sollux said, “Hiya, pimpslaughterer,” and shook a few bags of Skittles off his back. “Scare you?”

Dave scrubbed two furious hands over his face as Terezi said, casual as yoga pants and a bucket of wings, “I already used that one. Why are you in the trunk?”

“Going to Kansas.”

“Well it appears you were right after all, Dave! There will be too many people in the car.”

Dave peered between his fingers. Terezi appeared in slices, divided along the blurred, black lines of his middle finger. On one side she appeared smiling, one hand propped against the enduringly dusty side of the car, phone dangling from three fingers, bright sun picking out each strand of her hair. She leaned her weight towards Sollux, who Dave couldn’t see at all except by the dunes of candy he displaced. On the other side she was less—no smile, no sunlight, only the black pinch of her waist and the point of an elbow. The unfocused pillars of his fingers obscured the rest.

Dave sighed, and lowered his hands. “He stays in the trunk or else I dump him in Jersey and the guidos chews his bones,” he said, reaching for the keys. “Let’s just get this clowncar rolling.”

 

\----

 

Kanaya, surrounded on all sides by the rolling, roaring swamps of the I<3NY crowd and head and shoulders taller than the lot of it, raised an eyebrow at the Volvo. It looked, hemmed in by the hum of the maglevs and its own belching cloud of exhaust, willfully ignorant of its own obsolescence.

“How old is this vehicle?” she asked, leaning down to peer at the wheels. One of them didn’t match.

“Now is not the time, Kanaya!” Terezi shouted from the passenger’s side window over the mighty thunder of the tourists, one hand slamming the Volvo’s artfully dented flank. “We are stopped outside Penn Station! Do you fully understand how much of the traffic code we are violating? _Let’s go_!”

The rear passenger door bounced against its own hinges when it opened, shrieking with rust, and Kanaya carefully removed her hand from the handle, lest it dissolve or, possibly, liquefy. “This cannot be any less than forty earth years old. How likely are we to ignite or possibly combust while refueling?”

“We restarted the universe in 2013, nothing on this planet is even legal to drink!” Dave hollered from behind the wheel, “Get in the fucking car or we’re leaving you behind, Maryam!”

Kanaya shrugged and slid in with little urgency, tucking her head under the door. After Death by Eridan Ampora’s Hope Stick, even Death by Superannuated Swedish Locomotor counted as dignified, and the way her horns caught against the furry ceiling and her feet stuck under the furry seats, trapping her in a neat angle, she was sure she’d survive a crash better than, say, Sollux, who appeared to be free-floating in the trunk.

“Why is Sollux in the cargo compartment?” she asked the front seats as Dave tore off from the curb, merging into 9 AM traffic with admirably minimal amounts of vehicular bloodshed.

“Some say he died in this car, a victim of his own stupid stupidity,” Terezi proclaimed, nothing of her visible but the sharp tips of her horns over the headrest. One gray hand gesticulated grandly into Dave’s face. “Now he haunts its upholstery until his spirit may have its vengeance, except he can’t kill himself again so he, and we, are ultrafucked!”

“Hashtag true story,” Dave concluded, and aimed uptown.

 

Roxy, who waved them down a block from Jane’s townhouse, deep hills of luggage knocking against her shins, pursued a similar line of inquiry upon popping the trunk and finding a sizable amount of stringy troll therein.

“Some say he was born in this car,” Dave shouted back as Roxy and Sollux argued over whose knee got in the way of whose oversized boxes of shit amid the great sour sugar ergs.

“Indeed, he appears never to have left it!” continued Terezi at a low holler. Kanaya remembered her wise-at-the-time decision to forgo earplugs for a six-hour car ride and wondered what on earth had possessed her. “He subsists on snack crumbs and exhaust fumes, kidnapping young maidens from the backseats so that they might assure him that he is, as he has always suspected but never truly believed, the prettiest daffodil in the meadow!”

Dave chimed in on “the prettiest daffodil.” Terezi high-fived him in front of the rear-view mirror.

Roxy, hair bubbling and curling around her face in hot pink clouds, bumped her hips against Kanaya’s as she slid into the car, leaning back against the troll to prop her feet against the closed door. Kanaya watched warily as the high five morphed into brutal thumb combat over the gearshift, shifting one arm to accommodate Roxy’s head nestled against her boob.

Roxy whispered, not especially quietly, “I think this car might actually be helllllla ancient, K-Mar,” to which Kanaya could only offer a solemn nod as Terezi avowed further military thumb action and the Volvo spluttered east.

 

Jade asked the Sollux question when she crammed, in, too, except by the time the double act had been finalized and Dave and Terezi were ready to make their statement, she’d already fallen asleep with her head against the window and one brown leg extending over Roxy’s lap and near to breaching Kanaya’s. Jade Harley knew no day-night cycle, so Terezi shrugged and offered to the car, “He’s just kind of a bulgemunch, you know?”

The car (minus Sollux) murmured their agreement (Sollux shouted “Fucksuckers! All of you!”), and then they were through the tunnel and New York was suddenly and disappointingly Jersey.

 

\----

 

In Pennsylvania, Kanaya toyed with her phone and waited. They were in the lowlands still, where the air smelled of rivers, cows and, faintly, near exit 70, Hershey’s chocolate, and Roxy leaned over her lap in a rapture, still thrilling in the slope and slant of land outside the window after so many years at post-apocalyptic sea. The sky was cloudy with heat, Kanaya could taste it on the walls of her mouth, but the AC struggled on near her ankles and Jade snored low against the other door. Roxy’s head dropped to follow the rise and sweep of the telephone wires and her hair lingered a moment against Kanaya’s cheek.

Propping her hand against the pastel bow of Roxy’s back, Kanaya read back through Rose’s most recent messages, careful of the ones that made her speakers ooze briny ichor when lingered upon too long. A phone that could survive the eldritch pollution of a text from the Furthest Ring had been necessary since a particularly memorable Christmas six years ago and intermittently handy since, much to Rose’s embarrassment and Kanaya’s resignation. Androids had proven the sturdiest so far, although the poor iPhone still appeared during the occasional full moon, hovering behind their heads in the bathroom mirror and chiming menacingly.

Roxy shifted and Kanaya slipped the phone back into her skirts as the other girl resettled in the center seat, thrusting her hand back behind her head, over the seats, reaching for candy. By the meat-on-meat sound of it she caught Sollux’s eye instead, and Kanaya smiled as she tracked the mile markers and the pea green country behind them, worryingly comforted by their bickering. She supposed she wouldn’t know what to do with herself if everyone got along.

Terezi, head rolled back on the thin stem of her neck to catch the action, offered, “Before we affix Sollux’s head to the pike, have we considered stopping for real, not-candy food? I could be considered peckish.”

Dave, roused from his interstate torpor, shifted towards her, eyes still on the road. “You eat?” he asked, “Do you eat? Like, real food? I thought you just subsumed, or, like, did that whale thing with the hairbrush teeth and the krill, except particles of red dead malevolence instead of krill.”

“I could eat you,” she countered, all other passengers suddenly forgotten, “should a court of law deem it necessary. It would be a tragedy, but I think the jury would provide both sympathy and napkins.”

“No, no, no, cannibalism isn’t eating, that’s just like your religion. Quiver in debatably orgasmic ecstasy all you want but I know that’s not how you’re providing thine fine self with the troll building blocks of troll life. Cannibalism is your palate cleanser if anything, just look at that maitre’d swanning over with that poncy napkin thing over his arm—“

Kanaya leaned just a hair further into Roxy’s personal space and whispered, “You will need to stop him now or we will not eat for several more legislative districts.”

Roxy shrugged her shoulder into Kanaya’s jaw and whispered back, “I got nada, yo. Last time they got stuck in a loop when I was around I just like, left. And when I came back they were sucking face soooo then I left again.”

Kanaya _hmmm_ ’ed and cast an eye back to the front seat. Dave and Terezi did indeed look stuck in a well-rehearsed script featuring thick red corn syrup and sharknados. Dave gestured wildly towards the windshield, the interstate, the cows beyond, and Terezi cackled a reply, something with more laughter than consonants. Framed in the powder blue border of the windshield, set against I-80 and the pale blur of gray sky, they could have been re-enacting any conversation from the past decade and change of their acquaintance, not a syllable changed since the day they met. It was an illusory sort of time travel, Kanaya knew. At that moment, completely engrossed in their patented brand of unending, entirely meaningless banter, she was sure they had no idea where they were. She’d always found that remarkable, their ability to speak at such length without saying a single thing. _Perhaps not admirable_ , she silently amended, _but certainly remarkable_.

There was something wet against her thigh. Wet and decidedly sinister. She dared a peek into her pocket as the phone belched yet another substance black and unmentionable into the fabric, because that was how the love of her life sent text messages these days. Roxy’s face against her shoulder crumpled in disgust. Then it was confusion, then hunger, and then at least three stomachs audibly growled.

“Okay,” Roxy said, suddenly decisive under the perpetual banter of their hosts. “This is it. This is situation critical. I’ma ‘bout to eat Sollux’s ear. It’s time to wake up Jade.”

 

\----

 

They pulled into Burger King less than fifteen minutes later because Jade was nothing if not loudly, loudly persuasive.

Dave leaned into Kanaya’s side, peering at her French fries as Jade dug into her second quarter-pounder and Sollux and Terezi talked garbled shit in Alternian, Roxy doing her best to laugh in the right places, and said, “That’s not ketchup is it.”

Kanaya watched him from the corner of her eye, pulled another tightly stoppered vial from the vast pockets of her skirts, and asked, “Does it look like ketchup, Dave?”

The smell must have reached him as she uncorked it since he immediately recoiled, rubbing at his noise, and muttered, “You’d better hope it does, Kanyeesus, because we’ve got this crazy human notion called hygiene and health codes and not indulging in pig’s blood catsup where the cashier can see us and call the CDC.”

Kanaya shrugged and popped a fry in her mouth. “I was not aware that the CDC ranked emergency calls from roadside Burger Kings as high-priority events. Indeed, I would deduce from my many years spent among your strange and backwards race that a Whopper _lacking_ that distinctive fizz of viral disease would be considered a mark against the franchise in question.”

Dave snorted into his Icee. “Yeah, ok, point to you, Twilight Sparkle—ow ok ow. Ow. That was a good one, you don’t hit me when it’s a good one.”

“I recall no such arrangement,” Kanaya replied, and helped herself to his Icee. Brain freeze was long past an issue, so she helped herself to about two-thirds of it, and then some of his chicken tenders since he probably deserved it.

The Burger King hummed with the language of truckers and vacationing families, interspersed with the sharp clatter of Terezi and Sollux’s talk, and Kanaya caught their conversation in half-measures while Dave made an inadvisable move for her fries.

“ _—Fuck on fire, are they still that archaic? No outside contact at all?”_ Sollux chattered, Alternian sharp and crooked against the gentle Texan glide of Dave’s desperate pleading.

“Holy shit, holy shit, I’m so sorry Kanaya, don’t break my fingers—“

Across the table, ignorant (likely willfully) of Dave’s pain, Terezi shrugged, her mouth a crooked line.

“ _It will depend on my specialization. If they place in me the Legislacerator’s covert operations branch, then—yes. I won’t be allowed any correspondence with Earth until they’re done with me.”_

Dave’s fingers had gone still in Kanaya’s iron grip. When she looked down he was staring fixedly at the whitening skin of his own bloodless knuckles, limbs still in the way a plucked guitar string is still until you get close enough to see it shudder.

 _“And they still haven’t told you where you’ll be?_ ” Sollux continued, _“Isn’t that, I don’t fucking know, kind of important?”_

Terezi’s voice was still like stone, not guitar strings. _“As you said, they’re archaic. I’ll likely receive a lovably spartan message with my assignment in the next day or two.”_

Dave pulled his hand away from Kanaya’s and she let him, watching his face. Terezi had a God-given talent for dismantling her xeno-life partner’s poker faces but for everyone else, excepting perhaps his ectosiblings, it was a learned skill. Kanaya considered herself conversant, maybe working professional in Why Does Dave Look Like A Rumpled And Sort Of Twiggy Marble Bust Today, but this particular stone face would have required fluency at the very least, had it not been for the magical realm of context cues.

“Dave,” she began, slowly, softly, as if approaching a small, sort of twiggy mammal. “Have you discussed with Terezi this upcoming feature in your relationship?”

Dave grunted.

Kanaya chanced a glance at Terezi, who appeared to be focusing on the Sollux with the same dead-eyed intensity with which Dave was currently eyeballing his chicken nuggs.

“Dave,” she tried again, and now she could see Jade over his bent head, making no attempts at subtlety in her eavesdropping. “Have you perhaps discussed with Terezi, your long-term girlfriend and frequently-professed ‘negaverse dragon senshi of your heart,’ _any_ upcoming features of your very-quickly approaching ultra-long distance relationship?”

Dave looked like he might have grunted again, in which case Kanaya would have put a straw up his nose, but then replied, to his chicken nuggets, “It’s complicated.”

Kanaya found her hand creeping towards the straw dispenser and took a few steadying breaths. “Dave,” she began, for the third time, but then Dave was hunching forward, one hand around his Icee and the waxed paper buckled under his fingers, raspberry slush spitting from the top.

“Kanaya, I’m gonna need you to leave it,” he ground out, voice still soft enough that they could all pretend Terezi couldn’t hear. “Please.”

Kanaya moved to reply, one hand coming forward, but then there was a foot connecting with her shin and Roxy stared her down from across the booth, face still smiling at Sollux’s last obscenity. Roxy shook her head, quick enough that it could have been hair in her eyes, then she was back and laughing and chattering her way through Alternian, all eyes on Sollux and Terezi and not in the least Kanaya. Dave had gone stiff again beside her, his only motion in his fingers as he played over the creases in his cup, and Kanaya pursed her lips but looked away. She could feel a great welling of auspisticism within her, that special blend of exasperation of can-do attitude, but settled for collecting the debris of a lunch not tastefully spent and escorting it, piece-by-piece, to the trash.

 

\----

 

By general consensus Burger King would not be a repeat affair. Luckily, there was candy in the car.

One horn resting against the warm glass of the window, Kanaya drifted. The AC has been axed half an hour out from the restaurant after the Volvo started making pointed gestures towards overheating, and in the combined heat of high August Appalachia and the five warm bodies surrounding her, stomach full of Gushers and just a little blood, her phone a comforting weight in her open palm, she watched the browning trees slide by.

Despite the soporific heat, conversation continued to her right. Sollux leaned head and shoulders over the back seats, occasionally passing up the odd bag of 7-11’s finest grub as he and Roxy and Jade talked itineraries. Dave and Terezi sat in the front in what was, for them, relative silence, idly warring over the radio as it scanned through the high mountains’ slim AM pickings. There was a buzz of music between soft gobs of static, and then the interstate began another slow dip into the hills, and it was lost. Kanaya heard it all through a thin haze, thumbing through her phone’s open pesterlogs without much conscious thought. Karkat, Terezi, Feferi, Rose. Karkat, Terezi, Feferi, Rose—

Roxy and Sollux were making envious noises. “—and I heard they’ve even gotten Zyme and Dyme to speak!” Jade was saying, conspiratorial in the heat. “It’s on their Delta Cephei work, really top-notch, and with Errox there from DoneArts as the keynote—“

There was something viscous trickling down the inside of Kanaya’s wrist. She stirred, tapping at her phone, and, indeed, Rose had sent her a text. The phone horked another gobbet of tar into the dip of palm as she tabbed between her messages and Google Maps, inputting coordinates and planning routes and slowly coming back to herself.

Roxy was speaking now, hair bobbing as she gestured. “—we met online like a year ago and they’re really cute and really really sweet and they like cats _so much??_ Like that may be the most important part—“

“Dave, I need you to take the next exit,” Kanaya said, over the chatter, and Roxy cut off with a yelp.

Dave squinted at her over his glasses, through the mirror, and called back, “Really? We’re in the middle of fucking Kentucky right now. This is really where you’re going?”

Kanaya took a moment to consider this. “I was under the impression we had yet to leave Pennsylvania.”

“I—no, ok,” Dave spluttered, waving a hand between the seats as Terezi snickered. “Unimportant right now. Look, when you said you were picking up Rose in eastern Pennsylvania I thought you meant, like, Pittsburgh!”

“And you know that human saying relating to assumptions and the making of asses, Dave,” Kanaya replied, looming forward between the seats now, menacing, foreboding, one hand still kind of sticky. “Now hit the rightmost directional indicator lights or we will miss the turn off and I will make you jump the median.”

“Jesus, okay, okay. Can’t do anything in half-measures can you.” Dave muttered, twisting to check his blind spots. Kanaya shifted back into her seat, wiping her hand discreetly against the back of Terezi’s and began collecting her belongings from where they’d managed, over the course of less than six hours, to secret themselves all around the car. She suspected it was some kind of road trip magic, how her lipstick had ended up wedged between Roxy’s ass and the seat when she was sure it never left her pockets, and her wallet had secreted itself away in an empty bag of CHEETOS® Crunchy XXTRA FLAMIN' HOT® Cheese Flavored Snacks, and her sunglasses were simply gone. Road trip magic sure was stupid.

 

\----

 

Dave rolled to a stop a few minutes later, gravel crunching beneath the mismatched tires, less than a mile from the highway and, by the looks of it, at least a hundred from the nearest town worthy of its own dot on the map. Without the barriers of asphalt and mile markers between them and the country, the mountains looked suddenly massive, huge folds of rock sliding beneath each other amid a spattering of hardy trees and grizzled looking bushes. A white speck half a mile up the nearest slope could have been an especially punk rock mountain goat.

Kanaya smiled, mostly to herself, when she shouldered open the door, savoring the smell of the place. It wasn’t as red as her desert, or nearly as thirsty, but it was empty in its own way and she found she’d missed that in the cities. Other people were aggravating at high concentrations.

Behind her, Terezi asked, through the quiet and the ticking of the engine, “So why exactly is your wifebride communing with the scruffy-looking nature? Weren’t she and Dirk attempting cross-dimensional communication in Seattle this week?”

This was apparently new information as Roxy was now, for some reason, shouting, something like _whoa waht janey made him fricken chicken promise not to mess w that bs after that time with the clones and that dude who looked waaaay 2 much like alan rickman!!!_ , and Dave was throwing down with the elderly and recalcitrant parking brake but it sounded like he was adding _what the fuck who let them talk i thought i was clear on my position re them talking_ but Kanaya just grabbed her duffle from the trunk and explained to the mountains, loud enough for the car to hear if they shut the hell up, “That is correct but unfortunately out of date. There was what Rose assures me was a minor mix-up with the preparations for the dimensional crossing, such that she and her ectobiological father have been trapped in the Furthest Ring since some time Thursday.”

Shouting intensified. Kanaya made sure that the stoppers on all the blood flagons in the duffle were tight.

“For two very clever people they are also astounding dumbfucks, I agree,” she continued over them, slinging the bag over her shoulder. The stakes dug slightly into her ribs, as did the knobby ends of the pig bones, and she regarded the car with an expresion she would consider fond and what others might generously term begrudging acceptance. “But Rose has left overly-detailed instructions on the workings of the homecalling ritual, and promises that if Dirk could refrain from further antagonizing the Great Calamaris That Be, as she says he says he calls them, they will survive until at least Tuesday.”

Roxy was propped halfway out of the car now, elbows locked and hands tight at the edge of the rolled-down window, Jade crowding for space beside her. Sollux hung out the trunk, confused and blinking but sensing an opportunity to be superior about something, and Terezi kept Dave in his seat with one hand, a grin smeared wide on her face. The clamor had calmed, with reluctance, although Roxy still looked mutinous.

“Well then!” Terezi said, far more entertained than her boyfriend, whose mouth seemed unable to form complete words or sentences. “Good thing we’ve got a troll as experienced in the inadvisably eldritch as you on the job, Mrs. Maryam-Lalonde.”

“Yes, well,” Kanaya said, with a moment of hesitation. Her fingers tapped at the strap of her bag.

She thought if she just said what she wanted to say she could perhaps formulate more articulate thoughts on the consequences at a later date. “I suppose I was lucky my loved one did not hesitate to ask me for help, nor to keep me abreast of her condition.”

Terezi’s lips quirked, her features twisting in a hint of question. Dave went stony behind her, face half-shadowed on the far side of the car. The ticking was softer now, the engine cooling, metal contracting. A horn blared on the highway.

Roxy made a noise like _uggghghggh_ into the silence, rolling her eyes with extreme prejudice and shouting loud enough to unsettle the birds, “Well what are you waiting for, girl?? Go get your woman and slimedad-in-law! Calamalarees wait for no troll!”

“Yeah!” Jade continued, happy to make noise where there might otherwise have been none. “If you save their butts you get to, like, hold it over them forever!! Get going, missy!!”

The other three started cheering, misstep passed, Dave a half second behind and Sollux with perhaps more cynicism than was warranted, but shouting “Gogspeed!” and “Tell Rose we’re resetting the Days Since Cephalobomination calendar!” all the same as the not-distant highway thrummed with cars and the woods spread climbing around them.

Kanaya smiled and stepped backwards as she waved, laughing as their encouragement degenerated into heckling and blasphemies, and turned on the downstep. Back to the Volvo and its passengers’ shouts, sun in her eyes and heat storming her lungs, she went marching into the trees.

 

\----

 

Forty miles out, when they’d laughed themselves to stupor and spread out in the car, Roxy’s legs twining in Jade’s over the plush center seat, Roxy dipped a hand in her pocket and found a new text.

He Will Crash The Car If They Do Not Resolve Whatever Their Quote Unquote Thing Is

Or She Will For That Matter

She Is Talented Like That

Just For Your Information

P.S. The Kicking Was Beneath You And I Resent It

Roxy rubbed at one eye, her mouth a faint moue, and stuffed the phone back down a pocket before Sollux could make another attempt over the seats.


End file.
